Common and tacky
By DAN LANGFORD
Southern ladies used these words, and may still, in bringing up their children. “That’s tacky,” I can hear my mama saying across the years. “Don’t be common.” “Tacky’ is easy enough to understand, but ‘common’ can be confusing. In warning us against being ‘common,’ she didn’t mean ‘ordinary,’ though ordinary was never the level she and Daddy taught us to seek. By ’common,’ she meant she meant ‘plebian, unwashed, unmannered,’ and definitely not ‘raised right.’
Something exceptionally common caused her to use blistering phraseology — “common as pig tracks.” When Mama said that, you could hear the disdain in her voice, and could bet she thought the folks in question were of dubious quality – were folks she didn’t want to have a thing to do with, even distant family. “Those folks are common as pig tracks,” she would say about the harum-scarum bunch one of her mother’s first cousins had married into. “They’re not my kinfolks — I gave ‘em away.”
While I can’t say the following with complete authority, I would venture to guess that any native middle-Georgian of a certain age who has never heard his mama or grandma caution against being common and tacky…just may be.